


Fractured Link

by Trell (orphan_account)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Multi, Post Episode: s07e21 Reading is Fundamental, Season/Series 07
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-27
Updated: 2013-10-27
Packaged: 2017-12-30 16:28:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1020873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Trell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Meg goes on, resolute despite the way Dean flinches, "He likes me. He likes me a lot, and I like him back, and that's probably good enough for both of us. But fuck me for saying so, Dean-o, he loves you, probably more than anything else on his daddy's green Earth, and you need to man up and give back what Clarence over there has been devoting to you for years."</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fractured Link

Castiel explains it to him this way, once, when they're sitting together on a bench in a deserted park, snow falling all around them, landing stark and soft amidst Castiel's hair. The angel picks at the medical bracelet circling his wrist, sighs, "My heart isn't so small that there is only room for one," and takes Dean's hand; says the words a little as though they're a confession.

Sitting there, chill creeping up his sleeves and Cas more present and solid beside him than he's been in weeks, eyes terrifyingly lucid and watching him for a response, Dean can only give a mute nod. He hopes then that Cas gets that Dean's trying to understand, he _is_.

Dean's just kind of used to the idea of monogamy, is all. 

* * *

He doesn't really get what it all means until later, when he's seated next to Meg—again on a bench, and the scene is weirdly reminiscent of being in the park with Cas, except this time they're in the garden outside the mental institution where she's been looking after him. Cas is wandering amidst the flowers beyond, eyes unfocused, coat billowing occasionally in the breeze.

"Look, Winchester," Meg says, suddenly, breaking the silence. She's in hospital scrubs, smoking intermittently. "I care about wings-and-halo over there, all right? And you do too—don't deny it," she shoots a sharp look at him as Dean starts to open his mouth, "and you don't like me and I don't really like you, but it is what it is, and we should probably get along so we don't end up breaking him."

"I don't think he's that easy to break," Dean ventures, but he looks out into the bushes of flowers, at Cas cupping his hands round a blossom and leaning in, expression absent, and realizes that he's not so sure, these days.

Cas isn't what he used to be. Meg might be the only thing keeping him afloat; Dean's just old baggage, full of painful memories and accusations, and every time Dean does something caustic like telling Cas no one cares he's broken, she's there to give him comfort, to mend the parts of him Dean ruins.

"You manage to overestimate and underestimate him at the same time," Meg drawls, dryly, though her gaze is intent on Dean, boring into the side of his face. "You broke him pretty soundly, Dean-o, and you might break him more. But he's not going to stop caring about you, even if you do."

She goes on, resolute despite the way he flinches, "He likes me. He likes me a lot, and I like him back, and that's probably good enough for both of us. But fuck me for saying so, he loves you, probably more than anything else on his daddy's green Earth, and you need to man up and give back what Clarence over there has been devoting to you for years."

Dean looks at her, then, startled, meets brown eyes dark with a sorrowful sort of envy. Somehow, in all this, he hadn't paused even once to think about how Meg must feel about _his_ part in this equation, beyond their mutual distaste for each other.

"I can't," he says, abruptly. "Meg, I can't. Not after what he did. Not—not yet."

Meg levels him with a stare that's all fire and demonic strength. "Fine," she says. "Not yet, then, but think about it with your little pea-brain, huh? He needs you and he needs me, and you need him and maybe I kind of do too. You might as well accept it's never going to be as simple as just me and him or him and you."

"If it helps," she adds, thoughtfully, "back before he went fruit loops and we were still fucking, he gasped your name during sex."

Dean drops his head in his hands.

* * *

He talks about it with Cas again later, when they're curled together atop Cas's bed in his room at the mental hospital. Cas is still wearing his stupid trench coat over his clothes, always, and at least his angelic powers mean it's not covered in dirt from his gardening stint this morning; and Dean's piled unceremoniously next to him, his arms around the angel, trying to choke down the feeling of rising bile he gets every time Cas opens his mouth and reminds him that he's not okay, he's not the Cas he used to be.

Cas's head is kind of tucked under Dean's chin, forehead pressed into Dean's shoulder, and he mutters, out of the blue—a total nonsequitor from his earlier discussion of species of prehistoric fish—"I wish you wouldn't talk about me as though I am not there, with Meg."

"You heard us?" Dean says, struck with guilt and not a little embarrassment. "I didn't—Cas, I—" Somehow, the thing that drops to the forefront of his mind is him saying that he couldn't forgive Cas, couldn't let this happen between them, not yet.

"Wavelengths of celestial intent," Cas laughs lightly into his shoulder, and everything about him is light as air, these days, he's liable to blow away into the sky if Dean lets go of the string that tethers him, "have very good hearing."

"Sorry," Dean says, blankly, for lack of anything better. What do you say when you've been discussing how you're not ready to enter into a three-way relationship with a demon and a maybe-sort-of fallen, definitely fucked-up angel who swallowed all the souls of purgatory and released an ancient evil on the world?

"It's okay," Castiel says, very seriously. "I forgive you." Dean swallows, throat tight. "I would just like you to know that I think Meg was right—about both of you being important. To, to," the angel stumbles uncharacteristically, "to me, to each other. You should love each other," he finishes, disjointed.

At which Dean blinks, because he'd thought about her and Cas and him and Cas, of course he had, but this last hadn't occurred to him. "You want us to—? Cas, I don't think . . . man, there's a lot of shit between her and me. I don't think we're ever gonna get beyond that, not like you're thinkin'."

It's a miracle that Dean and Meg are even capable of being within a mile of each other, frankly. Dean's not ready to even _think_ of going there, except—

—except for a moment, with Cas breathing warmly against his collarbone, it doesn't seem so bad, the thought of having a third, someone who can understand the way he feels about Cas, maybe; get him, just a little, in ways that no one else can, in loving Cas and leaving Hell.

But jealousy and hurt flare up again, just as before, wipe the thought away. Beside him, Cas huffs in a way that sounds strangely off-pitch to Dean's ears, well-attuned to slight changes in Cas's usually unexpressive demeanor as he's become. 

Cas's voice is very far away when he speaks again. "Do you know the evolutionary development of the rhododendron?"

The abrupt change in subject, like Cas has just flipped the off switch on something that upsets him, makes Dean feel genuinely ill. He pulls Cas closer and says, squeezing his own eyes closed, "Nah, Cas. You wanna tell me?"

Castiel does.

* * *

Dean gets banged up bad by a Leviathan a month later—it leaves him with bandages and bruising and a splitting headache, all of which calls for a fuckload of vodka—and when he (sans Sam, who's chasing a loose end upstate) limps back to their current base and finds Cas zoned out on the couch and Meg sitting sprawled in the kitchen, he kind of wants to walk right the fuck back out. 

He doesn't need this drama in their safe house woodland cabin; he doesn't need this shit in his life right now, his best friend who's so broken not least because of Dean and this demon he can't decide if he likes or hates, and—

—he doesn't remember, after the vodka, the details of why he and Meg kiss. It's nasty (she tastes like sulfur and cigarettes, and Dean hasn't brushed his teeth in days) and rough, and it fires up something in him anyway, something he feels he's been missing for a long time, things he's been far too afraid to take from Cas. 

Cas is breakable, right? He's something fragile, something important, someone who bends and changes and dents under Dean's will. 

Meg, though, Meg is steel; a demon, old and ready and full of hellfire, scarred and thrice-damned like Dean, dragged down by hellhounds once and crawled back up from the pit after. Nothing Dean ever does or says can hurt her; she's something on her own terms, something over which he has no power, no reign.

He kisses her, and she kisses him back. Fingers rake through his short hair and grab his jacket, push him against a wall with inhuman strength, and Dean thinks _yeah,_ he's missed this.

They don't quite fuck that night, exactly, Dean hurts in too many places and is far too drunk by then for that level of athleticism, but she gets him off and he manages to do so in return, so it probably counts. 

Cas sleeps through the entire thing—or meditates, whatever it is angels do since they don't sleep—and only gets up after, when Dean's drifting off towards sleep himself and Meg is sitting back across from him, back propped against an armchair and finishing off the remnants of Dean's vodka. "Oh," Castiel says, voice full of something like pleased wonder. "Have you reconciled?"

"Fuck no," Meg and Dean say at the same time, and then look at each other.

"Fuck," Dean decides, and passes the hell out.

* * *

He meets up with Sam again two weeks later, by which point he's a) feeling better and b) sleeping with Meg on a regular basis, or, more accurately, fucking around with Meg and sleeping alone, because all of them have fucking intimacy issues and intimacy issues about fucking. Cas mostly wanders around the cabin and talks about disconnected things that don't make sense to Dean or, probably, to anyone but Cas; and all the while Cas looks at Meg in ways that _still,_ even though they've got this weird connection going on, make jealousy boil inside Dean.

Dean wants to be with Cas. Cas wants to be with Dean. Somehow both of them have ended up with Meg, and they're still walking in circles, never quite meeting or stopping long enough to push past their roadblocks, their fuckups, their feelings. Fuck feelings, fuck—

—anyway, Sam shows up at the cabin, takes in the sight of the demon and the angel and Dean drinking himself into a stupor (again) and says, "Am I intruding on something, here?"

Dean says, "Hell no," and, "I need a distraction, man, they're driving me crazy," all true and also a lie of omission, since mostly it's just _him_ that's driving him crazy. 

Sam says, cautiously, "Okay," and eases his way inside.

His report on what he's been doing isn't heartening. Leviathan activity's busier than ever, though they're growing ever more subtle: Sucrocorp's doing something, and neither Sam nor Frank can figure out what, and it's all looking like another end of the world except more whimper and less bang, this time. Dean wants to rip off Dick Roman's head for starting this all up again, and that just brings him back to thinking about Cas, Cas who let this happen, Cas who dragged them all back in.

Dean scrubs his hands through his hair and presses his palms hard against his eyeballs; and then he tells Sam he's gonna get some sleep, and drags over to his room in the cabin, shutting the door.

He and Meg move furniture around for a half an hour while Cas is busy regaling Sam with the intricacies of the golden ratio.

* * *

"Why do you let us do this?" 

It's Dean that starts the conversation, this time. He and Sam are stopped at some roach motel in Idaho, and Sam's out getting dinner. Cas is in the room, appeared just minutes after they arrived, Meg not far behind; she's currently outside on the breezeway, smoking, giving them some space.

Cas tilts his head, so reminiscent of the serious, collected weapon of God and Heaven that he used to be. Dean could cry. "Do what?"

"Fuck around. Without you," Dean says, and clears his throat. "You and Meg, you—didn't you? But now you're just letting us do this, without getting anything for yourself. I still haven't even," and here Dean cuts off, because he's not going to discuss his hangups with Cas, not now. It's clear enough, anyway: they still haven't so much as kissed, and Dean hasn't uttered the words _I forgive you,_ and Cas still looks at him like Dean's reached inside him and torn out his heart, every time.

Cas breathes out, seeming almost irritated at the question. "It was a way to be close," he says. "I don't care for it much, otherwise. Now you have each other for that desire, and I have both of you, regardless." Liquid, storm-blue eyes meet Dean's. "I do have you, don't I?" The words are so quiet, so fearful. 

Dean opens his mouth, closes it again. He can't say it—can't say anything, not about them, not about this, not yet. That's his defining mantra, lately: _not yet._

Instead, he reaches out and takes Cas's hand, brings it up to his lips and presses a kiss to Cas's knuckles, eyes never leaving his. Dean's always been better with actions than with words, and it's easier to show that he's trying, he's getting there, with a touch than with a phrase.

Cas looks like he's breaking, then, right then and there, sad and hopeful and _getting it,_ reading Dean's message loud and clear, every fear-filled and desperate bit of it. Incongruously, reflexive, the angel murmurs, "Klinefelter syndrome occurs in one in five hundred to one in one thousand live male births."

Meg chooses that moment to come back into the motel room, followed immediately by a frowning Sam with big bags of takeout.

"Do I need to start getting burgers for four, now?" he asks Dean, a crease between his brows. "They always gonna be here?"

"I guess so, Sammy," Dean says, reeling with how easy it feels to settle with Meg and Cas beside him.

Meg steals Dean's french fries and Cas takes half of her burger, and Sam looks on this whole procession with growing bafflement before finally turning away to his laptop and muttering something about Dean's bad habits; and for a moment it's all so fucking stable (even though Cas's head isn't working and Dean's kind of fucking with the wrong person and Meg still prefers going out to smoke rather than talking to either of them) that Dean could almost believe that they'll work.

* * *

He doesn't realize how much the dynamic between them has shifted until the day he walks into his room at one of their hideout cabins—they've been lying low for a couple weeks, law enforcement caught a glimpse of them in Illinois and went on high alert again—to find Meg kissing Cas with more tenderness than he'd be willing to give her credit for, and doesn't feel the expected acrid burn of jealousy.

Meg lets Cas go when Dean steps forward and the boards creak under his feet, smirks at him from where she's up on her tiptoes to be level with Cas. Castiel regards Dean silently, eyes dark; and Dean might not be jealous but he does hurt, damn it, because they're not repaired, the two of them, not really.

Cas fucked the world over again when they'd thought they'd finally saved it; Cas broke the wall in Sam's head. Dean can't let that go, even when all he wants is to kiss the frown finding its way onto Cas's clouded features away, kiss him until he learns to smile like a person and then kiss Meg for good measure, because this mess involves her as much as them. 

"Want in on this action, loverboy?" Meg asks, lilting and cliché. Sometimes Dean isn't sure if he's ever going to find the real her under all those layers and masks of sarcasm and cynicism; maybe the real Meg (even the name isn't hers, not really) burned away in the Pit, and this is all that's left behind.

"Dean," Castiel sighs, right beside her. Dean sees their hands are wound together, keeping them close.

Dean takes a shaky breath, and says, "Nah. You guys—you guys do what you were doing."

He walks back out of the room and leaves them to their murmured conversation, leaned close together, intimate in a way Dean doesn't know if he'll ever be with either of them.

That night Castiel climbs into his bed and slots in between his arms without saying a word and does a fine mimicry of slumber, chest rising and falling evenly, lashes resting against his high cheekbones.

Dean watches him for a while, quietly astonished, uncertain of how to take this, this freely given vulnerability; and then he sleeps, sleeps better than he has in months, wrapped around the guy who's his Judas in daylight and (maybe) the love of his life in the nighttime, pliant and warm.

* * *

He has his first Hell nightmare in months a couple weeks later, after a particularly vigorous session in bed with Meg, Castiel showing up after to lie with them while Meg smoked out the window and Dean drifted off. It had been good; Dean had expected to sleep soundly.

Instead he wakes in what has to be the middle of the night, gasping, sweating profusely, and barely manages to make the dash for the toilet to puke up his dinner.

So much for soundly.

Cas is still asleep (angelically catatonic. Whatever, seriously, some day Dean will ask him what it really is) when he returns, but Meg stirs as he shuffles past towards where he's thrown his duffel, looking for a jacket to throw on so he can go for a walk down to the lake the cabin's not far from and clear his head.

He wills her to go back to sleep, to not say anything, but no such luck. She sits up, crosses her arms over her knees, and says, quietly, after brief glance at the slumbering angel beside her, "The Pit, right?"

Dean doesn't have it in him to lie. "So what if it was," he says. He feels exhausted, and the images keep echoing in his head, make him want to puke again. He finally locates a jacket in the duffel by touch, pulls it out and on before realizing he's put it on inside out. 

"Means I'm not the only one." Meg shrugs, gives a harsh little laugh. "Fuck, I need a smoke. You're going out, right? I'll join you."

Dean wants to tell her not to bother, to go back to sleep, but it doesn't quite make it out of his mouth. "Okay," he says, and tosses one of his other jackets at her, though she probably doesn't need it, demon that she is. They plod outside together in relative silence, pausing only for Dean to grab a couple knives for safety, and as they start off down the gravel path that leads to the nearby lake Meg lights up a cigarette.

On the shore, Dean sits on a big boulder and Meg leans beside him, an indistinct shape in the late night (early morning) defined only by the floating ember that pulses every time she takes a drag. He thinks about not saying anything at all—he doesn't feel much like talking—but he feels the need to ask, then. "You still get 'em?"

"Yeah." Meg's answer is clipped, to-the-point. "I was down there a lot longer than you, green-eyes. I didn't have Clarence to pull me out a few years after I broke."

Dean swallows. "Sorry," he says. He doesn't feel guilty, not really, he knows what he went through's more than horrific enough; but he feels, perhaps for the first time, genuinely sorry for what happened to her. "Can I ask what landed you down there?"

He can't tell if she's looking at him in the darkness. He's not really looking back at her, anyway, mostly just staring out at the water. 

The silence stretches, and he thinks she isn't going to answer, which, well, fine. Dean's not really fond of talking about his shit decisions, either.

She surprises him by finally saying, "Sold my soul to save my lover. She was dying of the black plague."

"Yeah?" Dean says, startled. He hadn't realized how old Meg was; he'd thought she was like Bela, maybe, died recently and came back up. She certainly hadn't seemed like the oldest demons, out-of-touch and twisted beyond recognition.

"Yeah." A spitting sound, and another drag of the cigarette. "It got me a little while after, and down I went. Don't know what happened to her after that. Didn't claw my way back topside until the eighteenth century."

"Fuck," Dean says, with feeling. Three hundred years missing from Earth, that's like—he does the mental math, stumbling sleepily over it— _forty-eight thousand years_ in the pit. Fuck. _Fuck._

"Don't you dare say you're sorry," Meg says. "I got Clarence if I need someone lookin' at me with doe eyes. You can just be grateful you weren't down there that long, give me some much-needed solidarity, and shut up."

"You got it," Dean says, and does so.

They stay on the shore in silence for a long while, not talking, two veterans of the bloodiest battlefield there is.

* * *

The Leviathan keep plotting. Dean and Sam keep running. Meg and Cas stay a part of Dean's life, to his surprise, don't vanish or evaporate, keep showing up wherever Dean and Sam are staying. They get near him together or in parts: Cas likes to sleep in Dean's arms, and Meg likes to fuck, and Dean likes both of these things more than he's willing to say.

Sam's mostly managed to hold off asking, which Dean sincerely appreciates, but when Dean's luck finally runs out and Sam walks in on Dean and Meg kissing roughly in a motel armchair with Cas watching, rapt, from where he's curled in on himself on the bed, he yelps "What the fuck, Dean," and slams back out the door like the overgrown moose he is. 

Dean has to chase him down and explain— _no, Cas and I aren't, Meg and I are, it's sort of all three of us but not, it's complicated, okay_ —and then explain again, as clearly as he can, given that most of this doesn't even make sense to him. Sam frowns a lot and points out the hypocrisy of Dean fucking around with a demon given how Dean acted about Ruby, and Dean has to admit that yeah, he kind of walked into that one.

"Look, it's different, okay," is all he can say, helpless. "It's Cas, you know? It's different because of Cas—Meg and I, we're just, it's a connection. Shit, Sam, I don't want to talk about this with you."

Dean doesn't want to talk about it ever, actually, with anyone except maybe, someday, Cas. Someday when he can finally walk up to Cas and say _I'm ready_ , and kiss him with the passion he kisses Meg, with the intimacy she kisses Cas. 

"Just tell me," Sam sighs out, like he's equally done talking about this, "that you know what you're doing."

"Uh," Dean says. 

"Yeah," his younger brother says, and it's kind of derisive and Dean totally deserves that. "That's what I thought."

* * *

They get snowed in up at the mountain lakeside cabin the next time they lie low and Dean can't even think about driving the Impala back down for a while. Sam hangs out in the kitchen with his laptop, bitching about the spotty internet; Meg and Cas appear and stay.

Cas burrows himself into Dean's bed and refuses to leave, wraps himself around Dean like a frickin' octopus anytime Dean comes back (which is often, because he's got a shitty tv set up in here and there's nothing else to do but watch it from the bed anyway), and Meg is less clingy but equally present. Eventually—during some crime procedural Dean's only been half-following, dozing off with Cas pressed so pleasantly against his shoulder and side—she teases him into kissing, and then they're doing that with some gusto, and then:

and then Dean, unthinking, impulsive, turns and lays one on Cas, who thus far hasn't gotten much into the proceedings save for receiving a sloppy kiss on the side of his mouth from Meg (which had brought out a subtle little smile, all in the lines around his eyes and the twitch of his lips).

The world stops.

Dean jerks back, nearly pushing Meg far enough over to fall, and Cas just stares at him, wide-eyed, expression stuck somewhere between shock and incredible hope.

"Dean," he breathes.

"Shit, I," Dean says, "Cas, I'm sorry." What can he possibly say? _It was a mistake?_ Well, sure, but. _I want to kiss you and I want to do everything to you and I love you but I can't forgive you even though this has fucked you up as much as everyone else—_ yeah, not much better.

Cas's eyes go shuttered, like Dean's struck him. He opens his mouth, and Dean wants to capture those lips with his own, he does, he wants so much to make this better but something won't let him, and what comes out of Cas is, "Please."

"I can't," Dean says, his own voice sounding foreign.

At which point Meg says, "Oh, for fuck's sake," and pushes him forward into Cas's arms.

Cas catches him easily, angelic strength unbudging; Dean swears, "Meg, what the shit—" but she overrides him, presses him solidly into Castiel's accidental embrace.

"No, shut up," she's saying. "Be a dear and kiss the girl, huh?"

Dean stares at Cas. Cas stares back, eyes wide, not breathing at all. 

And Dean pulls back, past Meg—who lets him go—over to the edge of the bed, runs a hand over his mouth and tries to forget the ozone-infused taste of his best friend. A person could get addicted to a thing like that. "No," he says. "No, Cas, I'm sorry, not yet."

Meg makes an exasperated sound and pulls out her lighter, lights a cigarette with a click. "Goddamnit, Dean," she sighs.

Castiel's voice is hollow when he says, "In your language, the production of blood in the marrow of the bones is known as _hematopoesis._ " And, as an afterthought: "I started it again, in you, once."

Dean walks out, and out into the cold, and slams the door so hard the whole cabin shakes. 

* * *

Meg finds him, later, comes out bundled in a comically large parka with fur trim around the hood. It looks good bounding her round face, and if she didn't look so pissed Dean would maybe even call it kind of cute, and isn't that something he never thought he'd think about a demon.

As it is, she stomps down over the log-steps imbedded in the path around the cabin to where Dean's sitting by the fire pit, teeth no longer chattering as a result of his thin jacket, and says without preamble, "You can't keep doing this to him."

Dean doesn't say anything. It's not as thought he can contradict with _I'm not doing anything to him_ : he knows he is. He knows exactly how Cas looks at him, these days, knows exactly how Dean affects the stupid loyal former member of the Host of Heaven wandering around the cabin up the hill.

"You need to either tell him _never_ ," Meg instructs, "or stop with this bullshit and at least let him try to make it up to you. If you don't, I guarantee you there's gonna be a day soon when Clarence and I leave, and you won't ever see us again, because you haven't got wings."

"I could summon you," Dean fires off. "It's not that hard."

Meg scoffs. "You think you're the only ones with charms against rituals and possession? Trust me, I'm a master of running and hiding. If I don't want Clarence and me found, we're in the wind, honey." 

She reaches over and grabs his chin with her fingers, then, forces him to look at her. "You got that, Winchester? Last chance."

"Yeah," Dean says, shell-shocked by the thought. "Yeah, okay."

"Good," Meg says, and disappears, without any of the rustle of wings Dean has gotten used to hearing.

* * *

It hits him, just how full of shit he is, when he's still very much alone in bed that night. Meg and Cas are nowhere in the cabin to be found; they vanished shortly after Dean and Meg's little talk, though she left him a note to assure him this wasn't the _big one,_ they'd still come back.

Cas, he realizes, has always been someone in need of a leader to follow: and in this whole vicious cycle, in all these bad decisions, he and Dean have been equally culpable, every time—and Cas is trying so hard to fix what he's done.

It's practically the hallmark of a Winchester to start at least one Apocalypse, anyway, isn't it? And Cas is family. Despite everything, _because_ of everything, Cas is as much a Winchester as either Dean or Sam, and that gives him at least one get-out-of-jail-free card for his fuckups. 

Hell, it gives him dozens. Look at Sam; look at Dean himself.

Which is how Dean—devout unbeliever and faithless Righteous Man—ends up putting his hands together and praying for Castiel, crazy, broken Castiel, barely an angel by his own calculation, to visit upon him. 

And, miracle of miracles, there's a flutter of wings and Castiel is standing by the window, hunched in on himself and seeming smaller than he should be but definitely there, arms wrapped around himself and the trench coat bunched close. "Hello, Dean," he says, and the words are a pale imitation of what they used to be but Dean loves hearing them nonetheless, is infinitely reassured.

"C'mere," he tells Cas, and, "come on," when Cas hesitates. Cas does, after a moment, walks closer and gets tentatively onto the bed, staying over the covers.

Dean thinks the time for talking is past, by now; and it's dark, and late, and he's cold and achingly empty in ways he hasn't been able to fill since the emptiness started, and it's so much easier to do this when he can't see Castiel's face.

He pulls him in for a kiss, chaste to start, holding Castiel's face in his hands.

Castiel melts against him like there had never been any hesitation, opens to him even though he hardly moves, doesn't dare to put his hands on Dean. 

Dean breaks the kiss just long enough to say, "Cas," and hold him still for just a moment. He can only make out the glints of Cas's eyes and the darker moue of his mouth in nighttime dim, and that's okay, that's enough. "I forgive you."

 _Then_ Cas moves.

It turns out he's not incapable of reacting like a person—and god, _god_ , the way his arms come up to wind around Dean's neck as he kisses him warm and wet and like he's been _dying_ without this (and fuck, it scares the hell out of Dean that maybe he _has_ )—and Dean gives back as good as he gets, runs his hands under Castiel's coat and tangles them up together more closely than they've ever been before.

They kiss for a long moment more before Castiel breaks away and buries his face in Dean's shoulder, so like he had before with Meg, a dozen times before in sleeping with Dean. But shudders work through him, this time, and Dean is very suddenly aware that he's got an angel maybe crying into his shirt.

"It's okay," Dean says, and plants kisses against Cas's face and along his jaw and down his neck, devotional, "we are going to be okay."

And, for the first time, even with the world going to shit for the second time in his life, he's certain they are. 

* * *

When he peels his eyes open at the crack of dawn, Meg is sitting on his other side on the bed, arms crossed and eyebrows raised. "So," she says. "Can all three of us get it on together, now, like we're damn well supposed to when your emotional constipation isn't involved?"

"L'ter," Dean grunts, because he's not awake enough for this. "Def'n'tely."

Meg makes a put-upon noise, but crawls under the covers with them, anyway, on Cas's other side. "Yeah," she says. "All right."

Between them, Cas shifts, trying to press closer to both. Dean, sleepily, takes one of Cas's hands and hides it between his own, and Meg shifts closer, snakes her arms around Castiel's chest.

They fall back asleep like that, wound together, angel, human and demon, irretrievably linked.


End file.
